Ms. Elizabeth Kadetsky is a journalist, essayist, and fiction writer whose work often explores uses of memory and the filters of perception that can influence, distort and protect it. Her explorations into nostalgia have led her to an interest in the layered significances around the topics of antiquities and patrimony. Her most recent book, The Memory Eaters, released in March 2020 and winner of the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction, was featured in The Boston Globe, LA Review of Books, and The Rumpus and was named a top pandemic read by Buzzfeed. Her essays and short stories have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and two Best American Short Stories notable citations, and they have appeared in The New York Times, Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. Her other books include two works of fiction and the hybrid work of memoir and reportage First There Is a Mountain, published by Little, Brown in 2004 and re-released as an e-book by Dzanc Books in 2019. The latter came out of Ms. Kadetsky’s research as a student Fulbrighter to India during the first of her two previous Fulbright grants. She is an Associate Professor of Fiction and Nonfiction at Penn State University and a Nonfiction Editor at New England Review.
Ms. Kadetsky’s narrative nonfiction Fulbright-Nehru project follows the story of a set of Gupta era sapta matrika sculptures and their theft, export, and recognition as objects of exquisite beauty on the world stage. A work of general nonfiction, the research investigates what became of missing members of the set of sculptures, stolen from a temple in Rajasthan in 1956. A work of archival research, travel writing, history, reflection, investigative journalism, and creative nonfiction, Ms. Kadetsky’s project and its original research uses her lens as a mother and daughter to explore the layered significance of the sculptures’ journey(s) in the context of international calls for the restitution and repatriation of stolen artworks.